Benjamin Franklin : An American Life

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Summary: Benjamin Franklin, An American Life
Review: I found this book to be very inspirational. Benjamin Franklin was really an outstanding individual and Isaacson does a great job telling his story. Ben Franklin seemed to learn the hard and valuable lessons of life while he was still young. He learned how to fight for his beliefs and influence others with tact, cleverness, and success. He strove to be an active and valuable citizen. He made major contributions to what we treasure as 'americanism'. He was a founding father of our country in every sense of the word.

I hated the last chapter of the book entitled "Conclusions". I hereby advise Walter Isaacson to omit it on the next revision. That chapter undid many of the wonderful feelings I picked up reading the earlier chapters. I advise new readers of the book to remove those pages and shred them before even reading one word in the book.
Ralph Hermansen
September 10, 2003

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Summary: The prototypical American
Review: Ben Franklin, signer of the Declaration of Independance, of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, and of the Constitution of the United States, and the most proletarian of the Founding Fathers, has been afforded a wonderful tribute in this probably definative biography for our generation of a truly great man. Jefferson is generally thought of as America's first Renaissance man, but as Isaacson amply demonstrates, the title most rightly belongs to Franklin. Isaacson carries the story of Franklin's life from the time of his birth in humble circumstances to his death at 83, when he had become one of the world's most famous men. Isaacson gives us insight into the sources of Franklin's well deserved fame. Franklin's autobiography, extensively quoted, is probably the most famous of this genre in the world still, certainly in this country, and provides a constant backstop for Isaacson's loving portrait of an exceedingly complex man. Had he come to the fore today, in these days of Republican mores and instant scandel, Franklin's sexual and marital history would have destroyed one of America's greatest citizens before he even started. Thank God he lived in a more civilized time. A wonderful and exhilerating read. wfh

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Summary: Well Done!
Review: Great book, just buy it and enjoy!

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Summary: Breezy Franklin Biography Sure to Fly Kites
Review: Walter Isaacson's new biography of that "love him or leave him" American icon, Benjamin Franklin, is nowhere near as comprehensive or as original as the recent biographies by H.W. Brands and Morgan. Nonetheless, Isaacson's contribution is extremely readable and doesn't stray too deeply into the many rivers that fed Franklin's life. It is, in no small part, the breeziness of Isaacson's prose and his colloquial use of language in the narrative that will surely make this a popular biography.

From the outset, it's clear that Isaacson is a Franklin Fan, though he does a credible job of presenting a balanced history and known facts, from letter excerpts to reproductions of paintings and diagrams. Isaacson's partiality toward Franklin seems to interfere in only a few places -he's almost too ready to excuse or not delve into some of Franklin's more minor (albeit speculative) faults, or explore more mercenary motivations for some things Franklin did. Nonetheless, this biography of Benjamin Franklin is the one I would recommend to the uninitiated and particularly to younger and adolescent readers. Isaacson provides a nice buffet for the casual reader and new discoverer of Benjamin Franklin, if a little heavy on the politics at times.

This book very nicely compliments the towering biography "The First American" by H.W. Brands, a magnificent book that requires somewhat more digestion, but Isaacson shouldn't be dismissed as a lightweight: He should be lauded as a man who has again tried to bring Franklin the man down from the mountain and give us the man rather than the myth. By and large, he succeeds very well indeed. Definitely worth the read, and a great book for "anytime" reading.

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Summary: Buy this book! (Part 2)
Review: I am unable to find Isaacson breaking much new ground in re-discovering Franklin's life - this book is essentially his summary of standard works on Franklin, including the recent ones by Brands and Morgan. The end notes are replete with references to primary sources, however, indicating either that Isaacson had consulted them, or that readers may find further info from these on specific points. This makes it different from Isaacson's earlier biography of Henry Kissinger, for which he had done original research and investigative reporting. Ironically, I think Issacson's judgement about Franklin is on the whole a lot sounder than his opinions of Kissinger.

This book is somewhat heavier on the political career, although Franklin had several different careers all going on at the same time: literary, scientific, inventive, business, etc. This is not unexpected from a political journalist.

Isaacson makes the point that Franklin was an experimental scientist rather than a theorist. This is true, but not without qualification. As far as the science of eletricity goes Franklin was both an experimentalist and a theorist par excellence.

The distinction in the 18th century between experimental and theoretical science was in fact not clear as it is today; hence the term "natural philosopher" for scientist in those days. Isaacson was mistaken in contrasting Franklin with Galileo and Newton: in fact Galileo was famous for his gravity experiments made from the Tower of Pisa, and Newton was every bit as experimental as anyone when it came to optics and astronomy (Newton even made his own telescope with commumate skill). Both Galileo and Newton were astronomers: celestial mechanics, or astronomy, was an empirical science.

Franklin in fact carried the science of electricity to the maximum THEORETICAL extent possible for the time without resorting to mathematical equations, which in any case would not be available until James Clerk Maxwell's work on electricity and magnetism. His famous kite experiments have always given people the wrong impression that that's all Franklin did for electricity. Not so. His discovery of the principle of the conservation of charge is theoretical physics, and his invention of the terms positive and negative charges presaged the duality of nature later found by Bohr and other quantum physicists. Franklin may have been an experimentalist a la Bacon. A better comparison is with Darwin, who amassed observations to construct a scientific theory (that is, a highly rigorous set of self-consistent explanations of empirical data - not the "unproven hypothesis" as "theory" is commonly understood). Darwin was a "naturalist," but also an experimentalist (some of his experiments concerned selective breeding) and an empiricist who founded a theory (also called a "standard model" as the term is sometimes used by cosmologists). Modern-day quantitative population genetics and molecular biology in no way render Darwin's theory obsolete just because they are mathematical; in fact they confirm it. And Franklin was very much in the same mode as Darwin (or the other way around).

Isaacson makes the common error among Franklin biographers to claim that Franklin was mathematically inept. Not true. The evidence for Franklin's numeracy is his mastery of magic squares and magic circles, a subject not even mentioned in this book. (For this subject I recommend the book by Clifford Pickover - fascinating.)

On the whole, though, this is a very good book. It has its own limits, but then no single biography of this multi-faceted Renaissance genius could possibly hope to be complete. This book has some fantastic pictures, many in color - a rare treat. (I have never seen the Robert Feke's 1748 portrait reprinted in any book IN COLOR.)

Two books that I recommend in addition to this one are "Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison" by the distinguished Harvard scholar I. Bernard Cohen; and "To Begin the World Anew: the Genius and Ambiguities of the Founding Fathers" by Bernard Bailyn (also a distinguished Harvard scholar). Neither book is listed in the sources by Isaacson, although one of Cohen's other books is and Bailyn's book is cited in the notes once.

Franklin's own writings are of course absolutely essential to understanding the man, and the best one-volume compendium is probably the "Writings" edited by Leo Lemay and published by the Library of America. (It's not cheap, but for a nicely bound 1600 pages book printed in fine paper, it is a bargain. You can find it here on amazon.com.)

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Summary: Terrific and enlightening.
Review: Get the three best books on great 18th/early 19th century personalities published in years:

1. THIS BOOK by Isaacson.

2. Joel Hayward, "For God nd Glory: Lord Nelson and His way of War"

3. Evan Thomas, "John Paul Jones: Sailor Hero and Father of the American Navy"

These three books are all succint, original and carefully provocative. Dont ignore any of them.

Now, this review is supposed to be about Isaacson's Franklin, so let me say that this splendid book make me realise what I had long ignored: that Franklin rates as high as Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers in creating the democratic principles we enjoy today. He was brilliant: as a propogandist, publisher, inventer, theorist, philosopher, diplomat, and statesman. This acutely insightful book does Franklin full justice.

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Summary: I finally understand Ben
Review: This is the most insightful book on this significant icon of American history. I couldn't put this book down. Definitely worth the investment.

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Summary: An American for America
Review: After listening to Ben Franklin, An American Life, I came to realize that Ben Franklin was not only this kind old gentleman as portrayed in many motion pictures of today but a living, breathing person of his time. He had the ability and ambition to change his fortunes and develop the circumstances that he found himself in. He had the ability to compromise, change and accept what, at the time he lived, might have been slightly less than his immediate goal. He developed within the confines of his time, a life that was riche and diversified while maintaining his basic principles.

An example of this is his carting his printing materials to his shop to show the towns people that he was very industrious. This act alone was not a necessary component of his success. His development of friendships and relationships that lasted throughout his life allowed him to grow as a person and helped as he became involved in the development of this republic, both here and abroad. Some of these relationships became estranged, thus creating some personal pain, the main one which was his relationship with his illegitimate son.

I particularly liked the last segments where the author was comparing comments made by various other authors on Ben Franklin's life. It was interesting to see how they have changed from less flattering to more flattering over time.

The reader, Boyd Gaines, maintained an excellent pace and was easy to listen to. Something that I might criticize is, and it is really just a minor point, is his trying to use various accents to differentiate the characters. It did create the affect he was trying to achieve but at times it was distracting. I have listened to this book twice and will do so again. It is one that should be in your collection even if you are not a history buff.

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Summary: A Detailed, Insightful and Vividly Written Biography
Review: Benjamin Franklin was one of those rare people whose influence on American life was so wide-ranging that we keep meeting up with him today at every turn, despite the fact that he has been dead for 213 years.

Walter Isaacson tells us in this detailed and insightful biography that each time we patronize a lending library, smile at a political cartoon, accept home delivery of our mail or contribute to a matching-fund drive, we are building on something that Ben Franklin started. And not surprisingly the barometer of Franklin's posthumous reputation, which has gone up and down with changes in American fortunes, is still in flux today. The commentators Isaacson cites, both pro and con, range from Franklin's own contemporaries to John Updike, Thomas Pynchon and Groucho Marx.

Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of a biography of Henry Kissinger, sees Franklin as the perfect exemplar of American middle-class virtues. He was, says Isaacson, a "natural shopkeeper" and "quintessential networker" who valued hard work and frugality while dreading alike "rabble rule" and titled elites. He was a practical artisan-experimenter rather than a deepthink theorist. He found religion useful mainly because it tended to make men act virtuously rather than for any of its claims --- to him highly doubtful --- of divine sanction. He was the American proconsul for the French Enlightenment.

He was a sexual dabbler but not, at least provably, a libertine. His relations with his own wife and children were oddly distant and dispassionate. In politics he looked for what worked rather than what suited high-flown theories of government. Isaacson sums up this aspect of Franklin's life work in a pithy sentence: "Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make democracies."

His attitude as his country drifted toward revolution was also pragmatic. At first he was a loyal British subject, insisting that whatever differences arose across the Atlantic divide were between two branches of one indissoluble family. Only quite late in the game did he convert to the revolutionary cause --- and then, with typical insight and energy, he worked to get the 13 colonies to unite as one body instead of continuing to act as 13 individual and mutually suspicious entities. Our nation's first political cartoon was his famous drawing of a snake divided into 13 parts labeled with the names of the colonies under the slogan "Join or Die."

Franklin's own marriage, which lasted some 44 years, was a common-law union without benefit of any ceremony. He spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life an ocean apart from his wife, and he did not attend the weddings of either of his two children. The sad tale of his estrangement from his illegitimate son William, who remained a British loyalist during the Revolution, is told here in detail. Isaacson makes a further remark that goes a goodly way to illuminate Franklin's personality and character: "He would lose many male friends, but he never lost a female one."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN is vividly written and packed with quotable anecdotes. Isaacson has mined Franklin's writings for all sorts of juicy tidbits and spread them out for us like dishes at a delightful picnic buffet. My favorite lesser-known maxim from POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC: "There are more old drunkards than old doctors." He also gives due credit to Franklin's gift as a homespun humorist, quoting with relish some of the pamphlets that he produced under pseudonyms to poke fun at ideas he thought were ridiculous.

This fine biography sets Franklin before us in a fully rounded portrait, with due notice paid to his shortcomings and those occasions on which he acted with more guile than wisdom. All of the familiar Franklin set pieces are here: Poor Richard, the famous kite-flying experiment, his diplomatic feats at home and abroad. But Isaacson's canvas is much wider, and he fills it out with gusto.

The next time you're lucky enough to look at a $1,000 bill, take note of the Franklin portrait that graces it. If Walter Isaacson is right, Ben may wink back at you.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn

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Summary: A rewrite of the Brands biography
Review: The H.W. Brands biography, "The First American: The Live and Times of Benjamin Franklin" came first, covers all that this biography covers, and -- most important of all -- is far better written. It commences in epic fashion with Franklin being in the "cockpit" to be harangued and humiliated by an English version of a McCarthy hearing. The incident we were told helped lead up to Franklin's abandoment of his long-held belief that the colonies should NOT separate. Then, our appetites whetted (i.e., Why this attack? What was its nature?), the biography begins.

If Brands is the superior writer and was first, why then all the excitement about the Isaacson biography? Well, Isaacson has Time Warner behind him and he did do a good job of recasting the H.W. Brands biography in his own words. And Franklin's astounding list of accomplishments certainly makes for interesting reading even in the hands of a lesser-skilled writer. The content itself makes up for the Cliff Notes approach to writing.

I first read the H.W. Brands biography. Then, I ordered this one for some new insights or quotes or examples. The fact is that Brands said it all and said it all better. Isaacson may have a greater appeal to those who like a bulleted list approach and frequent summaries to help them through a thick book. But, those who enjoy good prose, a biographer with a good if non-intrusive sense of humor, and seeing the victory of merit over a publicity machine, are best advised to get their hands on Brands's even more enjoyable biography.

I take Isaacson at his word that he has read a host of books other than the Brands book that is conspicuously absent from his bibliography. But, all he needed to read for his preparation the Brands biography of Franklin. (The sole examples that I can find of some original material are some quotes he made from Van Doren's biography of Franklin. Those, at least, didn't appear in the Brands book. So, I stand corrected by this exception. There is a little value added by the Isaacson version -- very little, but something.)

Good news: Franklin's inventiveness, dirty trick campaigns, wisdom, leadership, and flirtations are sure hits no matter which biography you pick up. But, if you want to see a truly five-star performance, do check out the Brands biography. The difference between the two is the difference between a work of literature and the Cliff notes, between the art of the biographer and the sterility of the summarizer.